The Moving Cart

The day has just begun and the lonely cart has to move again. Peeping through one of the many generous slits that house the shack, Arul sees his father leave the place, pushing the soon to be refilled cart up the mound. Arul feels a sudden tremble as he watches the blue tarpaulin on the moving cart flutter as the headwind grows stronger. The grimy tarpaulin assumes the personality of a transient canvas painted with a message, while his father turns back towards the house furtively as he lights up his beedi and assured that neither his son nor his daughter has caught him in the act descends the mound.

Arul checks on his little sister who seems to be lost in deep sleep. Picks a wooden block starved at the top and which bears an unhappy resemblance to a cricket bat and starts off on a lazy walk to the nearby ground where all his friends would have already gathered. The tremble stalks him again like a stranger and creases his face. As his frolicking friends welcome him the tremble gets drowned. With kids the lucky part is the nudity of conversations, they start and end with no formal introductions or denouement; and the next day or the next year you can start off from where you left.

Unwillingly, Arul tries to slip into the activity of the day by getting into the trained form of emotions within a familiar group. Against the run of play a chilly wind gushes past and as if not to cheat the pal fore-bearing the message, the rain starts as the clouds charge into a canopy. The tremble in his mind announces itself again but now the image of the descending Cart accompanies the flash.

Arul and his friends come into a huddle under a tree, which in that moment was more than a tree; in that it embodied a "powerful friend" in whom you had placed your trust and rest assured that the "powerful friend" will protect you from any trouble that you may face. Soon, in a matter of minutes the ground was flooded and the only sound, presenting itself beyond the vertical bumper to bumper rain traffic was the disappointed curses on the rain from his friends.

Suddenly, he seemed to remember something. The fact that his mother had died and there was none to comfort him when he goes back home seemed to be an archived video his mind was retrieving now and playing it back to him. He starts remembering some more; another thread tying his life back onto the pole of his defined existence: His feeling of what his mind feels; a feeling of numb pain the source of which no medical scan can locate.

The "remembering drill" stops as the rain starts practicing its climax and in a matter of minutes drizzles to a complete stop. Arul starts walking back home, not knowing what was carrying him back there other than the security of assured food, the need to see what his sister was up to and the prospective entry of his father.

Reaching home, Arul could only see that his sister was still huddled up. She thought she was doing it because it was pleasurable to stay asleep while Arul thought she was afraid; one step out of the cot and she would be on the uncertain "moving cart".